Letter from 650+ Groups Opposing Fossil Fuel Projects and Proposed Permitting Reforms

[Donkees]

Link to tweet

Re: Opposition to Fossil Fuel Project Approvals and Permitting Reforms Conditioned on the Inflation Reduction Act

Excerpt:

Dear Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer,

On behalf of 653 frontline communities and environmental and other organizations representing millions of members and supporters nationwide, we are writing to express our strenuous opposition to any additional fossil fuel giveaways. Alarming proposals have been referenced by Senator Manchin, in a short memo, and in legislative language that was clearly drafted in consultation with the American Petroleum Institute (API). It has been reported that Manchin has demanded these handouts to the fossil fuel industry as a further price for his vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which already included large giveaways to polluters.

We call on you to unequivocally reject any effort to promote fossil fuels, advance unproven technologies, and weaken our core environmental laws. You must stand with the communities who continue to bear the brunt of harm from fossil fuels and act to prevent wholesale climate disaster.

This fossil fuel wish list is a cruel and direct attack on environmental justice communities and the climate. This legislation would truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard by gutting bedrock protections in the National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Water Act.

In a further affront to frontline communities and climate science’s mandate to end all fossil fuel expansion, this legislative proposal would promote and prioritize dozens of fossil fuel projects including the incomplete fracked-gas Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), and dictate where future court cases to protect communities and the environment can be filed. Building this unnecessary pipeline could violate Indigenous sovereignty, property rights, threaten endangered species, devastate sensitive Appalachian ecosystems, further degrade hundreds of critical waterways, and disproportionately harm low-wealth communities and communities of color. The MVP is using eminent domain for their private gain leaving landowners with all the risk. The MVP could be responsible for an additional 89 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, the equivalent of 26 coal plants. New fossil fuel infrastructure projects, including MVP, are flatly incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In the words of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

https://peoplevsfossilfuels.org/dirty-deal-letter/

[in2herbs]

1. If Manchin's poison has already been included or will be included in any legislation in order to

get support to get passage of the other legislation, if the mid-terms give us enough of a majority in the Senate to render Manchin (and Sinema) moot, would it be possible to pass amendments voiding, or extremely diluting, the poison he has demanded in any legislation?

[Donkees]

2. ''Or it's possible Schumer and Manchin agree to put off consideration until after the election.''

The Manchin proposal also could go forward as a stand-alone bill. Or it's possible Schumer and Manchin agree to put off consideration until after the election.

https://rollcall.com/2022/09/06/stopgap-funding-bill-set-to-dominate-september-agenda/